“Zimbabwe’s new president offered an open invitation to international capital investment and latecomers for Zimbabwe’s trek down the neoliberal development road.”

Over the last four months, peddling the mantra “Zimbabwe is open for business,” the country’s new president in cahoots with the Western press has been whitewashing a military coup into a popular, peaceful revolution that brought from exile a benevolent leader and placed him in power on an interim basis until elections. Omitted from the portrayal of the March 11, 2018 op-ed, “We Are Bringing About the New Zimbabwe ,” published in the New York Times and by-lined to Zimbabwe’s sitting president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, are all the maneuvers selling out the country’s political independence. Given reports of what happened to some of ZANU-PF’s G40 faction, including the killing of a bodyguard, and jailing with allegations of torture from November 14, 2017, until at least Robert Mugabe resigned as president a week later, the accounts in Mnangagwa’s op-ed are a pretty audacious rewriting of history.

I am greatly concerned by the misconception that is awash in various foreign and local media that for Zimbabwe’s elections to be regarded as free and fair, they must be endorsed by the EU and USA.

The road from colonialism to one man one vote was a long one, accompanied by indiscriminate expropriation of African land and their rights. One such right was the right to one men one vote or universal adult suffrage which finally came after the sacrifices made by the gallant sons and daughters of Zimbabwe.

This right was fought for by our forebears for over 100 years from the first Umvukela to the war of independence. The ability to cast a vote meant they had a voice and they could choose our own leaders but through various colonial measures such as the qualified franchise a few Africans could vote in the then colonial Rhodesia.

For years, Western journalists have castigated Zimbabwe's land reform program. From afar, they pronounced land reform a failure for having brought about the total collapse of agriculture and plunging the nation into chronic food insecurity. Redistributed land, we are continually told, went to cronies with political connections, while ordinary people were almost entirely excluded from the process. Farmland went to ruin because of the incompetence of the new owners. These were simple messages, drilled into the minds of the Western public through repetition. For Western reporters, certain that they owned the truth, emotion substituted for evidence. Those of a more curious frame of mind, however, were left to wonder what conditions were like in the field, where no reporter bothered to venture.

When Zimbabwe initiated fast track land redistribution in 2000 it was big news for corporate media to echo several patented denunciations, characterizing the process as rife with corruption, violence, and inefficiency and doomed to fail.

More than eager to join the fray was the liberal left whose pseudo analysis reiterated the same line accompanied by an imprudent aversion to anything that seemed even remotely favorable to Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe and his ZANU PF party.

Given all that media fanfare, it would be easy to assume an independent study examining results from the last 10 years of land reform would get the same attention. Not likely. In fact, we can be sure more attention will be given to the dispatches from the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe publicized WikiLeaks. One cable by former U.S. Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Christopher Dell reveals nothing unexpected or compelling except Dell's aptitude for writing subjective diatribes that are able to pass for concrete information to the politically uncritical eye.

The received wisdom among Western governments, journalists and some concerned progressive scholars is that there have been no broad-based, economic sanctions imposed upon Zimbabwe. Instead, in their view, there are only targeted sanctions, with limited effects, aimed at punishing President Robert Mugabe and the top leadership of the Zanu-PF party. The sanctions issue, they say, is a red herring Mugabe and his supporters use to divert attention from the true cause of Zimbabwe's economic meltdown: redistribution of land from white commercial farmers to hundreds of thousands of indigenous families, a program denigrated as "economic mismanagement".

South Africa is maintaining pressure on the United States and Europe to lift their illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe with the latest call directed on Washington to engage Harare in dialogue rather being "divisive" and polarising the country.

South African President Jacob Zuma has been calling on the West to remove the sanctions regime saying the embargo puts Zanu-PF officials in the inclusive Government at a disadvantage as they are barred from travelling to Europe and other Western countries on Government business yet their MDC counterparts visit these countries freely.

Ahead of his recent state visit to Britain, President Zuma urged London and its Western allies to lift the sanctions and has repeatedly made the plea to give the inclusive Government a chance to work.

Tony Hawkins, a professor of economics at the University of Zimbabwe, thinks that Western sanctions on Zimbabwe should be maintained but that their effects "are minimal" and that "their continued existence really plays into the hands of some people in Zanu-PF."

You would think, then, that Hawkins would favor the lifting of sanctions. After all, why continue to play into the hands of Zanu-PF, if, like Hawkins, you're opposed to the party, its direction and its program, and the sanctions' effects are minimal anyway?

The crisis in Zimbabwe has intensified. Inflation is incalculably high. The central bank limits – to an inadequate level – the amount of money Zimbabweans can withdraw from their bank accounts daily. Unarmed soldiers riot, their guns kept under lock and key, to prevent an armed uprising. Hospital staff fail to show up for work. The water authority is short of chemicals to purify drinking water. Cholera, easily prevented and cured under normal circumstances, has broken out, leading the government to declare a humanitarian emergency.

In the West, state officials call for the country's president, Robert Mugabe, to step down and yield power to the leader of the largest faction of the Movement for Democratic Change, Morgan Tsvangirai. In this, the crisis is directly linked to Mugabe, its solution to Tsvangirai, but it's never said what Mugabe has done to cause the crisis, or how Tsvangirai's ascension to the presidency will make it go away.

Zimbabwe: Zimbabwe: Land at Core of Western AngerFriday, September 19 @ 07:26:20 UTC

By Caesar ZvayiSeptember 19, 2008

IN our Shona culture, just as in any other culture, suspicion is always aroused whenever an outsider mourns more than the bereaved.

Then vanasorojena (the elders) tend to question the relationship between the mourner and the deceased and all his/her family.

Well, since the power-sharing agreement was signed by Zanu-PF, MDC-T and MDC on Monday, the Anglo-Saxon Alliance led by the EU and the US have been wailing like a newly-wed widow who has just been robbed of the joys of wedded bliss.

In fact, the Westerners just stopped short of rejecting the power-sharing agreement as if they are Zimbabwean citizens.

World Focus: Western Lies and Hypocrisy: How Zimbabwe Exposes Mainstream MediaSunday, July 20 @ 01:46:40 UTC

By Ras TyehimbaJuly 20, 2008

The recent Zimbabwe elections saw an escalation of attempts by external forces to intervene in the sovereign and independent nation. Given the complex circumstances surrounding Zimbabwe, for the millions of people in the Caribbean and around the world, it has been difficult to get balanced views of what is going on; ever since the Zimbabwe government, under President Robert Mugabe, started to reclaim land that was stolen during British Colonial rule. Since the start of this land reclamation exercise to now, the events in Zimbabwe have exposed, firstly, how complicit international media are in the imperial agenda of the United States and Britain and secondly, how irresponsible and lazy the local mainstream media are. Local media seem quite content to jump on the Anti-Mugabe bandwagon as they casually parrot news from international media sources such as BBC, CNN, Reuters and Associated Press.

Like some BlackCommentator.com commentaries of the last two weeks, accounts of the situation in Zimbabwe by Africa advocacy organizations are virtually identical to those of corporate media, UK and US government officials. Solidarity With The People of Zimbabwe by Nunu Kidane, the quote by featured cartoonist Tony Namate published in the June 26th issue No. 283, and Bill Fletcher's commentary titled, Mugabe Sworn in Officially...Simultaneously Loses his Legacy, in last week's issue No. 284 all depict Zimbabwe as descending to hell in a hand basket at the hands of a despotic Mugabe.

The disproportionate attention on Zimbabwe has intensified in the last few weeks as a result of the presidential run-off that took place Friday, June 27th. African (Black) people should see this attention clearly as a reason for extremely critical analysis on the matter.

Timothy Garton Ash, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian, has called on "people outside Zimbabwe" to "help the majority inside Zimbabwe have its democratic will recognized" by doing seven things, the first of which is to press their governments for stronger sanctions on Zimbabwe. Ash's column is titled, "We don't need guns to help the people pitch Mugabe from his perch."

Ash's argument, a call for "liberal" or "humanitarian" imperialism, is based on a false premise. It is also morally repugnant.

THE United Nations yesterday blocked attempts by Britain, the United States and France to declare MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai as the President of Zimbabwe on the basis of the results of the March 29 harmonised elections.

This came as South Africa's ruling ANC party rejected foreign intervention in Zimbabwe, especially from erstwhile colonisers.

Britain, the current president of the Security Council, tried to use Belgium to halt Friday's presidential run-off election and illegally install Tsvangirai as president, but South Africa's Ambassador to the UN, Mr Dumisani Khumalo, blocked these attempts.

By begging to be allowed to sleep in the Dutch Embassy on the eve of a Zimbabwean election in which he is supposed to be elected President, Morgan Tsvangirai has finally and openly shown where his real constituency is: in the North Atlantic states of Europe and North America.

President Mugabe does not need to say more: Morgan is indeed much more than a Zimbabwean lost child.

His constituency is in Europe and he will be elected the best Euro-American puppet of the country while having tea and Dutch cheese in the Dutch Embassy in Harare.

THE late Adrian Rogers, once said, "Facts are like a recipe, truth is the meal. Buy the truth, and sell it not. We should value it in our own hearts. It is indispensable. We must purchase truth and the search for truth is costly."

There is no denying that Zimbabwe is going through the most trying times since independence. The strange happenings on our political landscape in the past few days are food for truth within the context of truth and responsibility.

In the same vein, the next few days and months are not only very critical but also crucial for Zimbabweans. Some people believe that with daggers drawn against it, only divine intervention will save Zimbabwe.